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Saturday, 28 April 2012

My previous post here highlighted my sad lack of buildings for certain types of games. To be fair 25mm games have never really interested me (aside from gladiatorial games), but I actually don't have much in the way of buildings for 15mm games either. I have plenty of strongholds for HOTT, of course, but the problem has always been that my selection of HOTT armies is so eclectic that finding buildings that would look right with many of them would be a full-time job.

However this afternoon I decided to expand my terrain collection just a little. I'd ventured onto The Junior General looking for some top-down figures for a project I'm mulling over at the moment, and ended up in their terrain and accessories section. Before I knew it I'd downloaded a rather nice medieval house and set about resizing it for different figure scales.

Printed straight off it is pretty much true 15mm. But buildings that are the same scale as the figure often don't look right, unless you're doing skirmish games, so I reduced the size of the image and printed it off again, creating a smaller house that looks better with 15mm HOTT elements.

Here you can see some Peter Pig Orcs marching past a village made up of both sizes of medieval house, plus a small stone house which also plopped onto my hard-drive:

Amazingly they didn't stop and burn the place to the ground.

Some more work on scaling and I did a version which I'd be happy to use with 25mm figures for 'Song of Blades and Heroes'. It's still slightly under true 25mm scale but will do the job. Here we can see some of the skeletons from last night's game wondering where the Lego's gone:

Quite fun to make, and quick as well. I think it's safe to say my next 15mm HOTT game will be featuring a built-up area.

Friday, 27 April 2012

John came over this evening and we played a couple of games of 'Song of Blades and Heroes'. More to the point we played an honest to goodness scenario.

A village, in this case a Viking village populated almost exclusively by lady Viking warriors, is the home of an artefact of an unspecified but Can Be Carried By One Man kind of nature. It's in one of the four houses in the village. The village is surrounded by a rather rubbish palisade with great big gaps in it, and has a watchtower.

One warrior is on guard in the watchtower, whilst the others sleep, scattered through the four houses.

An enemy warband, in this case some skeletons, launches a dawn raid on the village, with the aim of searching the houses, recovering the artefact and escaping off their board edge with it.

And that was it. we played it twice, swapping sides after the first game.

In the first game I played the skeletons. They weren't very good at sticking together - a lone skeleton approached the village, and immediately alerted the guard. The fact that the village was built from interlocking plastic bricks tells you that these were Danish Vikings:

The rest rushed towards the village, with varying degrees of enthusiasm:

But the Vikings were up and alert, and were organising a defensive line:

Some skeletons tried a flanking move through one of the other gaps in the palisade, but the beserker saw them off:

The skeleton numbers were dropping rapidly:

And the last few were now just fighting for the show of it:

The game ended in an easy victory for the Vikings.

John now took the skeletons. He split them into two groups. Here's one of them, approaching the village in a more orderly fashion:

They were at the gates before the guard spotted them. She was a real hero; not only did she raise the alarm, but she then used her throwing spears to dispatch three skeletons in three shots, pretty much neutralising one of the groups:

The other skeletons rushed into the village. One warrior came sleepily out of her cottage to see what the fuss was, and was cut down in an instant:

The skeletons were soon all over the village, but the Vikings were waking up and starting to fight back:

Disaster - the artefact was in the first house the skeletons searched. One of them raced away with it; it was only a matter of time before it reached the safety of its home edge:

See those two Vikings in he distance behind it? They gave chase, risking all on their activation rolls, and caught up with the fleeing skeleton, cutting it down, and saving the artefact:

This took the fight out of the remaining skeletons; they were slowly smashed to pieces, with insult being added to injury when the last skeleton was destroyed by the Viking's bard - a figure added just to make up the points:

In the first game I was unlucky with activation rolls; I had a number of good opportunities to overwhelm individual Vikings which failed when key figures failed to move into the attack. the key to the skeletons is coordinated assaults on particular figures, and with failed activation rolls I never got to administer killing blows.

In the second game the skeletons were able to gang up on some of the Vikings, but the heroic spear-thrower hampered them in one part of the village, and the equally heroic sprint by the two other warriors stopped them escaping with the prize.

On the whole the balance of this scenario probably favoured the Vikings, but we both had fun playing it. Even with the somewhat improvised terrain.

In both games I fielded The Spawn Of Tiamat, an army from Sumerian mythology featuring the mother of all that is chaotic and nasty - Tiamat:

She's actually a Magician. Just a very, very, big one.

In there first game they fought against Rama's army from the Ramayana in a mythological mash-up that makes a DBA Samurai vs Aztec game seem reasonable.

The two armies approach each other in what was never going to be a subtle battle of manoeuvre. Rama's army is mostly Knights and Warband, supported by a couple of Heroes. Tiamat also has Knights, but backed up by Hordes and Beasts. And a Dragon. Both armies have a Hero general. And, guess what - they were opposite each other in the battle-line.

Qingu, Tiamat's consort, and the army's general, comes off worse in the encounter with Rama. Game over.

We actually decided to continue the game, assuming that the two Heroes fought to a non-destructive draw. Qingu died on the next bound too. So we assumed another non-destructive draw, and played on. Qingu still died, so we assumed the dice were trying to tell us something and set up another game. Rama won easily.

The next game saw Tiamat's spawn attacking Elves who had, without asking, borrowed her stronghold (mostly because in my rushed packing this afternoon I forgot to include any. Luckily Tiamat's is in the box with her army).

The Elves were Spears, Shooters, Knights and another Hero general. But this time they avoided each other. Tiamat brushed up her Hero ensorcelling spells as the two lines closed.

And rolled a '1'.

The two lines clashed, and lots of shoving back and forth ensued, with the odd element being destroyed to add a bit of variety.

The Elves were having the worst of it, and in places their line was looking a bit thin. However all that was standing between Tiamat's Hordes and total destruction was the Elven lack of PIPs

Tiamat has a stab at ensorcelling the Elf Hero general to win the game, but rolls her second '1' and turns into a puff of blue Chaos.

Not a very dramatic picture, but this was the end of the Elven army - the Beast at the top of the picture has just destroyed a Shooter, pushing the Elves to 12AP of losses. Tiamat's Hordes have gone, of course, but replacements were already filtering onto the table out of shot to the right.

Two great games, and it was fun to get Tiamat back in action after she'd spent the last few months awaiting repairs on my painting table.

*When I say 'two of us' I mean in the bit playing miniatures - the regular role-players were there too. And the martial arts class.

Not a title I thought I'd post, living as I do some 10,000 miles from the UK's largest wargames event. Needless to say, I didn't attend this year. Indeed I haven't attended for several years, although I did from time to time when I lived in sunny Staines.

So why am I posting about Salute?

Well, lots of people have blogged about their personal Salute experience and favourite games, but they haven't shown everything. You can find those posts by clicking on my profile and trawling through the various blogs I follow. Or use Google. The first way's more fun, though.

However I knew that there was a South American Liberation game running this year (Ayacucho, 1824) and really wanted to see pictures. But none of my regular blogs mentioned it. So I resorted to Google, and found what I was looking for.

There's some real gems in there. Aside from more pictures of the Ayacucho game I was pleased to see a battle from the delightfully obscure Sonderbund War of 1847, as well as what seems to be a fusion of the classic board game 'Thunder Road' with Captain Scarlet. The giant monster game looked fun (and the photos seem to include a shot of the rules used) and I was thrilled to see my old club, The Staines Wargamers, featured as well; theirs is the Pear Harbour game.

So, for those of you who, like me, couldn't make Salute, trawl through the pictures and see what you were missing.

Wednesday, 25 April 2012

The Epic of Sundjata is a West African tale that tells the story of the rise to power of Mali's greatest king, Sundjata. Sundjata was an historical figure, born in about 1210AD. According to the legend, he was the son of a second wife of the Malian king Maghan, and it was prophesied that he would become Mali's greatest king. However, when Maghan died, his first wife Sassouma saw to it that her son, Dankaram, was made king, rather than Sundjata, and eventually Sundjata was exiled along with his mother and brother. Sundjata grew to manhood whilst in exile, and learned that Dankaram has been usurped by a powerful magician, the king of the Sosso, Sumangaru. Gathering an army, Sundjata went to war with Sumangaru, eventually defeating him at the Battle of Kirina in 1235AD. Taking his rightful place on the throne, he became Mali's greatest king, and forged an empire that was to last for another two hundred years.

These lists cover the two opposing forces at the Battle of Kirina, the climax of the Epic of Sundjata. The basis for both armies is the DBA Western Sudanese (1000AD-1591AD) list. Some useful historical background for this, compiled by Eric Lindberg, can be found on the DBA Resource Page at http://www.fanaticus.org/DBA/armies/III68/index.html

My main source for these lists is the book 'Sundiata - An Epic of Old Mali', by D.T. Niane and published by Longman. Yes, you'll notice that there are different spellings of the hero's name. That's what happens when you translate from one language to another

Sundjata is a mighty enough warrior to rate as a Hero. His brother, Manding Bory, commanded the Wagadou cavalry. A griot is a combination of bard, oral historian and advisor - every king had his own griot. He should be depicted playing a balafon (a form of xylophone), and his skill with this instrument placated the sorceror Sumagaru in a face-to-face encounter, hence the Cleric rating. Sundjata's sister, Nana, tricked Sumagaru into revealing the source of his strength, allowing Sundjata to drain him of his powers. Spearmen could be classed as Warband but of the two groups described in the epic, one is stated as forming a 'thick hedge' and the other as having 'longs spears' and 'menacing pikes', which sounds more like Spears.

Sofas are the rank and file soldiers. They are classed as Hordes because Sundjata seems to have been outnumbered in all of his battles and at one the opposing disposition was described as a 'valley, black with men'. Archers and horsemen are included to give the army a basis in its historical prototype; only the horsemen are mentioned in the main source I have used. Poisonous snakes filled Sumangaru's chambers.

Both leaders used owls to transmit messages to each other, so these could be added to their elements.

Footnote: This post was actually partially assembled, written and scheduled during a talk I gave on blogging to a local seniors' computer group a month or so ago. That is, this post was actually done as legitimate work. Good, eh?

Sunday, 22 April 2012

The Battle of Araure was fought on December 5th 1813, in Venezuela. Republican troops under Simon Bolivar defeated a numerically superior Royalist force under Jose Ceballos, in what accounts describe as a set-piece battle.

Aside from the date and the orders of battle for both sides I have no other information for this battle, and can't find anything on the internet either. But that didn't stop me from having a quick refight, using my Liberated HOTT variant (which you can find on my Free Stuff page). As with the Huaqui scenario I scaled the armies so that the smaller is 12 elements and the other proportionally larger (15 elements in this case). Both armies had one general.

I used a 2400p x 2400p board. There is no mention of any significant terrain in any account I can find, aside from it being fought on a plain, so I assumed that most of the battlefield is flat good going. However I couldn't resist three or four small areas of bad going, or even steep hills, on the flanks of the battlefield just to add some interest.

The Game

The two armies deploy 600p in from their edge. Roll a dice to see who deploys first; that side also takes first bound.

*This infantry is the Battalion Sin Nombre, made up of troops which had failed Bolivar at the earlier Battle of Barquisimeto. They were punished by being forbidden a battalion name, number or colours, and denied firearms until they redeemed themselves. They fight as normal infantry elements, but cannot fire.

**Treat Llaneros as Cavalry, but they always pursue a recoiling or destroyed opponent. Llaneros are the Venezuelan equivalent of the Argentinian Gauchos, and they played a key role in the liberation of their country - on both sides.

The Refight

The Royalist deployment - infantry in the centre, the Llaneros on the right flank and the other cavalry on the left. As ever the figures are from various Irregular Miniatures 6mm ranges. They are done in generic uniforms, so they can be used for battles throughout the conflicts. Indeed the Llaneros are designed as general purpose Latin American irregular cavalry, and may see use in my Maximilian Adventure games as well.

The Republicans placed their cavalry on the opposite flank to the Llaneros, opposing them instead with the Battalion Sin Nombre and the artillery. Again the centre was infantry.

Simon Bolivar surveys his dispositions.

Opening moves; the Llaneros push forward on the Royalist right.

The Llaneros hit the Republican line, but poor PIP rolls mean their attacks are piecemeal.

The Llaneros are broken up as Bolivar leads a cavalry charge on their flank.

But Bolivar comes under fire from the fast approaching Royalist infantry, and is killed. However Royalists losses are higher than those of the Republicans, so his army fights on.

And they fight on with great effect, virtually destroying the Royalist right flank.

The two infantry lines close, and volleys of musketry are exchanged.

The end of the battle; both infantry lines are broken up, but the exposed Royalist general is attacked by part of the Battalion Sin Nombre.

The death of the Royalist general. Having taken more losses than the Republicans, his army then routs.

The Royalists lost this one through throwing forward their cavalry unsupported and then not getting the PIPs to make the final charge to combat. This left them to be picked off by Republican fire. Losing Bolivar was bad, but the Royalist general was equally exposed and also paid the price. In Liberated HOTT I run the generals as a special element type; This may create more problems than it solves. I may move towards something closer to the original HOTT system, where the general is part of an element; for this period, though, I don't see him as being permanently attached to a particular group of troops.

The truth is that I can't see how Bolivar won this in reality and no historical account suggests where his 'edge' lay. In many of his victories he overcame difficulties to turn potential defeat into a win, but there's no suggestion he did that here. Obviously he could just have got lucky on the day, but accounts don't seem to suggest that either. On paper the Royalists should pretty much win this every time; bear in mind that I have probably downgraded the quality of the Royalist Llaneros cavalry - there's a suggestion that they should be Elite, which gives the Royalists a serious advantage that I can't see Bolivar overcoming. Indeed I tried this battle several years ago using a different set of rules, and the large Royalist cavalry force overwhelmed the Republicans with frightening ease. A quick run through of this battle yesterday using Liberated HOTT and grading the Llaneros as Elite also saw the same result - Bolivar's army destroyed with virtually no Royalist loss.

Even with the current setup, if the Royalists keep their army together they should roll over the Republicans pretty much every time.

Saturday, 21 April 2012

I'm currently playing around with some ideas for a simple campaign using my HOTT variant for the South American Wars of Liberation, and one subject that has come up is the idea of differing general abilities. To some extent I don't necessarily think this is an issue for normal HOTT games, as the player represents the general, and can be an inspired genius or a hesitant incompetent all by themselves. You can even have off days when that extra beer the night before clouds your judgement (anyone who's played Day Two at Berkeley will know about that). However for set-piece games, or a solo campaign it adds an extra wrinkle if the generals aren't always as good as they could be.

Traditional ways of showing good or bad generals are to use different dice - a D4 for a poor general, or a D8 for a good one - or a simple +1 or -1 to the roll. This isn't always viable for HOTT, where some actions cost 6 PIPs (although you could change it to All PIPs and get much the same effect).

My view is that whatever system you use any general should always roll between 1 and 6 PIPs, and their quality determines what happens at the extremes.

So, for example, you could change things so that a poor general rolls two dice for PIPs, and must take the score of the lowest, whilst a good general rolls two dice and selects the best. This would give a consistently good or bad performance throughout the game, but with no general able to roll lower than 1 or more than 6 PIPs.

However another approach is to assume that battles often hinge on one or two key moments, and the quality of the general often determines whether they are able to exploit those moments. On this basis I would have all generals behave the same for PIP rolls, but their quality coming into play just once per game - the key moment.

For instance, a good general can, once per game, reroll his PIP score if he doesn't like it. He must keep the score he gets. Conversely, once per game, the opponent of a poor general can demand that he reroll his PIP score, using whatever he then rolls as his PIPs for that turn. This means a good general can maybe avoid those critical turns where you don't want to roll a '1', whereas the opponent of a poor general can maybe see him freeze into indecision just as his army is about to perform a cunning series of manoeuvres.

One idea I quite like is to allow fixed PIPs on one turn; this is viable for the South American variant where there are no Heroes or Magicians to desorcell, or Dragons to deploy. A good general can, once per game, opt not to roll for PIPs and instead take an automatic score of 5.That is, you risk losing a possible 6 for the assurance of a decent number of PIPs on a turn when you may need them. As above, the opponent of a poor general can, once per game, prevent them from rolling PIPs, instead giving them an automatic score of 2.

So what are your favourite ways of representing different qualities of HOTT generals?

Just a short post, for once. Owing to John not being able to make our new Thursday night game session, I hosted him for a old-style Friday evening session. Most of the evening was spent playing a couple of games of Memoir '44. We ran through the Sword Beach scenario, swapping sides after the first game. The Germans won both of them, but I scored more points than John on my go as the British, so came out slightly ahead. In my attempt at the beach the British started well, but I quickly ended up with a hand of cards all directed at a sector where I had no troops, just as John managed to get a decent counter-attack together. I briefly held one of the objectives, but an artillery barrage put an end to that. I cleared a couple of the bunkers, though. When John played the British I was lucky, as the Germans, to have a good hand of cards, which allowed me to lay down a steady, deadly fire from the centre of the board. John managed to clear one bunker, but I reinforced it before he could carry the position. I'm not sure any of his troops got off the beach before he lost the game through casualties.

We then switched to 'Song of Blades and Heroes'. John took the Half-Orcs, whilst I tried out my Skeletons. The Skeletons lost as a cascading morale test caused them to crumble to dust just as they'd got to grips with their opponents. However a check of the SBH Yahoo Group suggests the morale rules for Undead have been updated since my copy of the rules was printed off; it looks like they no longer test for Gruesome Kills, and only crumble to dust on two or three morale failures, not any failure. That would certainly have made a bit of difference to our game.

Anyway, here they are, in all their bony glory:

They are original Citadel plastic skeletons which I painted about 25 years ago for use in our 'Chill' horror RPG sessions. They've been sat in a box unused for most of that time, so it was nice to have them out again, even if their first performance was less than stellar.

Friday, 20 April 2012

Another Thursday night down at the university gamers' guild has passed. The role-players weren't there this evening, but there seemed to be a martial arts class going on in one of the rooms.

Anyway, the four of us played 'Song of Blades and Heroes', a session in which we rediscovered Geoff's capacity for rolling ones and learned of Caesar's ability to create powerful, cheesy warbands.

Here's some shots of the evening's games.

Middle Earth Goblins (who still have a cave troll) face GW's Politically Incorrect Pygmies, supported by a Steve Barber giant ground sloth. The green counter behind the troll shows that it has been knocked down. By a pygmy.

On the other table (which lacked a board, or even a green cloth) Caesar's cheesy Ratmen (all gregarious long shooters with a CV4 tough leader) fought Geoff's Wood Elves.

Back to the Goblins and Pygmies - this was a long game, with two large warbands.

The troll is felled by the ground sloth. It actually died of embarrassment. The Goblins basically spent the rest of the game running away.

Meanwhile Caesar showed that he could be cheesy with Greek mythology too, pitting Minotaurs against Geoff's hapless Elves.

Finally his Ratmen faced a small, but motivated, force of Elves under my command. The Elves won, but we forgot to apply the Tough rule on the Ratman leader, so they probably wouldn't have done. The game ended with the last elf killing the last rat; everyone else had been killed.

Thursday, 19 April 2012

Basic ideas for this variant are freely nicked from the 5th
December draft of DBA 3.0. They allow variation in terrain which helps prevent the defender from laying cheesy or 'perfect' terrain. I say 'helps prevent' because no mechanism is perfect and I'm sure there are ways to break the system.

Using these rules adds no more than a couple of minutes to the set-up time for the game.

The Mechanism

The defender may choose up to five
pieces of terrain. These may be area features, roads, rivers or a waterway. No
more than one waterway may be chosen, and at least two bad going area features
must be chosen.

Or you could use a board
with pre-set terrain.

Area features are any bad going
(including steep/rough hills and marshes) and gentle hills. They must be at
least 200 paces across in all directions, and cannot be more than 800 paces
across in any direction. If fields or other cultivation they should be
rectangular, otherwise they should be roughly oval. BUAs can be either. Unless
gentle hills they must be placed entirely within a given battlefield quarter.
No area feature can be placed closer than one element base width from another
area feature or the edge of the playing area.

Roads are as described on Page 12 of HOTT. Roads may cross any
terrain. They must start at a board edge, and end either at a board edge in a
different quarter or at another road, or at a BUA.

Rivers are no more than 200 paces
wide. They must run from one board edge to a different board edge (or to
another river or to a waterway), and cannot go closer than 400p to another
board edge. They must flow through at least two battlefield quarters and cannot
be more than 1 ½ times longer than the distance between their start and end
point. A river may run through any area feature except a hill.

A waterway
represents the sea or a great river. It extends 200-600 paces inwards from an
entire battlefield edge and no more than half its length can be over 300 paces wide.
It can be bordered by a beach or flood plain extending up to 200 paces wide,
which is good going. It may include one island no more than 300p across in any
direction, which must be placed at least 100 paces from the shore.

To
place terrain, divide the battlefield into quarters, numbered 1 to 4. The
defender selects each piece of terrain in turn and rolls a die. On a roll of
1-4 the terrain is placed, or starts, in the corresponding quarter. On a 5 the
defender chooses in which quarter the piece is placed. On a 6 the attacker
chooses in which quarter the piece is to be placed. The defender always chooses
where in the selected quarter the piece is placed. It must be placed if it is
legally possible to do so, but if it cannot be placed then it is discarded.

(The
rules in HOTT for a legal terrain - pieces within 600p of the centre and so
forth - are ignored.)

Once
all terrain has been placed or discarded, the attacker decides their set-up
edge according to the normal HOTT rules.

Big
Battles

The battlefield should still be divided into four quarters for
placement. The defender chooses a minimum number of bad going area features
equal to half of the number of 1200p squares covered by the battlefield, and
the maximum number of terrain features which can be picked is one for each such
square, plus one. Waterways may only be placed along a short edge.

Example:
For a 48AP game the board is made up of six 1200p squares. The defender must
choose at least three bad-going area features, and cannot choose more than
seven terrain pieces in total.

Tuesday, 17 April 2012

"Your last 5 blogposts are the contents of a gaming zine you wrote single-handedly in the 1980s, photocopied on the local library photocopier or via indulgence of an office-working parent and sold on to around a dozen people at a loss. This zine has the same title as your blog. Invent an issue number and cover price.From somewhere rip off a suitable black and white illo (you want colour? print the cover on coloured paper you damned show-off) and fake up a cover page for this zine referring to contents inside. Bonus points for using period typewriter fonts and artistic filters to degrade the quality. Obviously if you have access to a photocopier and scanner you can start playing with distressing the paper and doing a proper illegible photocopy reproduction rather than faking it as I did. Then post on your blog for all to see."

And here it is - a 1980s copy of 'The Stronghold - Rebuilt':

The dragon illustration is by Ian Andrew Eldridge and the paper texture with authentic stains is by Peter Harris. Thanks to both of them for putting an appropriate Creative Commons licence on their work. The whole thing was assembled in Photoshop Elements 8.

The Stronghold Rebuilt

Officially a blog about 'Hordes Of The Things', the excellent fast-play fantasy miniatures rules from WRG. But expect minor, and not so minor diversions into other games as well, as my grasshopper-like mind leaps from one cool thing to another.

Allegedly worse than Hitler and more bigoted than The Miniatures Page. Actually not.